Goodbye to All
That - Robert Graves
Depending on one’s point of view, this is most famous or notorious of memoirs coming out of the First World War. Graves lets himself write about as pissed off a book as we will ever see a civilized, well-read Englishman of his generation write. No Ford Madox Ford-like melancholy. Little Remarque or Chapman-like praises of camaraderie.
The initial chapters are about being bullied at school
are unsentimental about those good old days, pits of snootiness, raillery, and
incompetent teaching. Most of the book relates his experiences as a lieutenant
and captain in the war. Snubbed at officers’ mess, an enraged and hurt Graves mutters
that he will outlive every one of the arrogant snots. When much later he finds
out that all of them got killed in the war, it’s shocking and ironic, in an
angry, dismaying way.
His tone is, in fact, is so blunt that we wonder how
accurate a story like this is: “Patriotism, in the trenches, was too
remote a sentiment, and at once rejected as fit only for civilians, or
prisoners. A new arrival, who talked patriotism would soon be told to cut it
out.”
He was also disgusted with jingoistic, bloodthirsty attitudes that he
found on the home front since they were based on willful ignorance of
conditions in the trenches. Graves gives his take on the controversy engendered
when friend Siegfried Sassoon made incautious public statements about pacifism.
Graves also describes his post-war PTSD in the form of insomnia, nightmares and
hallucinations ("Strangers in daytime would assume the faces of friends
who had been killed").
This eminently readable book is a must-read classic of the cynical postwar generation.
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